Twitter information for contributing to the strategic digital city: Towards citizens as co-managers

Highlights

• The use of ICTs in the strategic management of municipalities.

• Social media towards citizen participation in the decision-making process.

• Social media information for competitive advantages.

• Collective intelligence in the strategic digital city.

Abstract

Actions towards an effective city management require a focus on citizens, and it is a role of local governments to search for ways to provide their participation in the decision-making process. Among other information technology resources, local governments use social platforms thus facing the challenge of extracting and classifying information for strategic use. The objective of this study is to analyze Twitter information to contribute to the strategic digital city. The research methodology used was a case study of a Brazilian city. Twitter was analyzed, and the information assessed according to its characteristics, source, nature, quality, intelligence and organizational level. Results reveal Twitter allows communication, rudiments of public services and exchange and sharing information on municipal themes inherent to strategic digital cities. Information has quality and intelligence to serve the strategic level of government. The conclusion confirms that Twitter enhances transparency and strengthens bonds between local government and citizens.

Introduction

Cities gradually became major protagonists of the political, economic, social and cultural life and are considered complex social actors that express themselves through the link between political institutions and the civil society (Castells and Borja, 1996). Many projects that explore the political potential of information and communication technologies identify cities as the most geographically concentrated political units able to reflect civil relations (Silva, 2005).

Information technologies and cities relate through different experiences (Lemos, 2007), although all of them involve the compression of the traditional space–time concept (Lemos, 2005) inherent to a territory no longer geographical and geopolitical, the cyberspace (Mitchell, 1995), where cities experience virtuality (Guerreiro, 2006), a place permanently connected, ubiquitous and permeated by mobility (Lemos, 2007, Firmino and Duarte, 2010, Ergazakis et al., 2011, Kitchin, 2014). Within this perspective, digital cities emerge, environments that integrate information technology into the urban space, a virtual space where citizens can get information, communicate, interact with, and request services from the government (Graham, 1996, Lévy, 1999, Ishida, 2005, Guerreiro, 2006, Mendes et al., 2010, Rezende, 2012a).

New technological possibilities for horizontal interactions may interfere in citizen-government relationship, reflecting in contemporary political operations (Silva, 2005), bringing about alternative public policies, social interactions and political actions capable of transforming citizen participation and the democratization of the city (Rezende and Frey, 2005, Egler, 2010). Although there has been a lot of discussion about the Internet as a channel to foster democratic deliberation in the public sphere to produce more egalitarian policies (Norris, 2000), several problems remain unsolved, as many expectations for the possibilities of political participation and innovation in the public sphere and participatory democracy did not turn out as expected (Dahlberg, 2001, Silva, 2005). Social exclusion is one of the causes of failure (Tarapanoff, 2004, Rezende and Frey, 2005, Guerreiro, 2006) as Internet access alone is not able to ensure the improvement of argumentative political activities (Rezende, 2012a). Therefore, urban policies are imperative to meet the electronically excluded groups’ needs, enabling them to have access to a growing number of virtual urban communities targeting the association of citizens in a new virtual public sphere (Lemos, 2005). Even with the vast opportunities to participate, there is little evidence of the population’s interest in the political process and the possibilities offered by virtual environments are unlikely to be used unless the sense of apathy is overcome (Gomes, 2005, Marques, 2005). Furthermore, for Norris, 2000, Dahlberg, 2001, Silva, 2005 and Marques (2005), the power remains concentrated in the public sphere. Added to that, there has been a misunderstanding of the concept of information and the technology that makes it possible (Davenport and Prusak, 1998), as well as an inadequacy or lack of information, internal or external to the municipality (Rezende, 2012a). Consequently, it becomes vital to establish a process of acculturation, which can be effective once cities succeed at having more participatory citizens involved with the use of information technology, and government managers assume the role of info-managers (Rezende, 2005). Therefore, it is up to local governments to respond to these dilemmas of social cooperation and citizen participation in public policies by exercising the role as innovators in democracy (Castells and Borja, 1996, Norris, 2000, Egler, 2010). According to Benkler (2006), “the social practices of information and discourse allow a very large number of actors to see themselves as potential contributors to public discourse and as potential actors in political arenas”.

The objective of this paper is to analyze Twitter information to contribute to the strategic digital city. The work results from a research thesis, which involved collecting data from the city of Curitiba’s Twitter account. Subsequently, the information was classified as institutional marketing information or information on services, divided into municipal themes (health, culture, education, mobility, etc.), and analyzed according to its characteristics, source, nature, quality attributes and intelligence to serve the local government’s decision-making processes.

The research is justified by the assumption that virtuality forged by telecommunications and the resources of electronic mediation gives rise to arenas, public spaces where citizens can communicate over long distances, at a speed never imagined, (Braga, 2007, Ingram and Schneider, 2008). Under this perspective, citizens experience a new model of democracy that enables new forms of political organization, collective action and transparent participation of the civil sphere in the decision-making process (Braga, 2007, Egler, 2010). Hence the increasing use of digital platforms can be observed, aiming at achieving greater transparency in public services at lower costs for local governments. The goal is to have citizens who enjoy the benefits of using technology to get information and services in a more efficient manner. Bureaucracy thus moves into the digital space, bringing more comfort to citizens, the customers of the city’s services (Norris, 2000, Leite and Rezende, 2010, Dameri, 2012).

Among the possible environments for digital cities, social media platforms, understood as physical or virtual spaces where individuals who have the same goals create relevant information, have gained particular attention and their use mobilizes people and allows them to exchange and share information (Marteleto, 2001, Tomaél et al., 2005, Lerman and Ghosh, 2010). And the quest to find, strategically select and use the information retrieved from these alternative sources can result in a competitive advantage for city managers (Rezende, 2005).